When to do Gift Registry?

My fiance and I are newly engaged, and planning a long engagement of two years. We’re college students and move around a lot between various apartments throughout college/back home in the summer. I think we have three engagement parties on the itinerary during the next six months (one for family/parents’ friends, one for our TN friends, and one for our Georgia friends). We are hosting one of these and the other two are hosted by others.

I have read that it’s good etiquette to start your wedding registry before engagement parties take place so people can bring small gifts if they wish. However, as long as the engagement is and as much as we pack up all our belongings and move around for school, I feel it’s a little ridiculous to register this early. I know we could store gifts at my parents place, but how normal is it for people to bring gifts to engagement parties anyway? I’ve never been to one, but it seems a little over the top to expect gifts at the engagement parties, various showers, and some at the wedding. My family has customarily only given one gift to a new couple (i.e. if we are invited to the shower, we bring a gift to the shower and not to the wedding, or vice versa),

What do you all think? How early did you create your wedding gift registry?

People absolutely bring gifts to engagement parties. Even if they are asked to please not on the invitation. My FI’s cousin had an engagement party where on the invite NO GIFTS!! was in caps, and they had a room full of them anyway. We didn’t have an engagement party and people still MAILED us gifts. Wine glasses, cake cutters, champagne flutes, silver plated frames, gift cards for dinners.. We’ve been engaged for eight months and they STILL show up from time to time. <br /><br />Some people will show up empty handed, and some will bring a gift. Either option is acceptable. Some will bring small gifts like a nice bottle of wine, and some will go over the top. People do their own thing. Having a regisrty available with a few items you KNOW you’ll want wouldn’t hurt, and would help guide people toward things you like. We weren’t registered for a while because I had no idea gifts would start showing up in the mail, and while I appreciated every last one of them, some of them were just not my taste, which probably could have been avoided.

I created my china registry when I was ten. I have never been married and never been married. I have never created a “gift” registry and rather dislike the very concept. Have I confused you?

A “gift” registry presumes that you expect other people to give you stuff, and figure that you’ll be making it easier for them if you provide instructions on what stuff to give. If you think about it, that sounds rather entitled, doesn’t it? It is not quite “nice” to put too much energy into thinking getting stuff from the friends and family whom you value more for their love and kindness than for their fat pocketbooks. By the highest standards, it is “over the top” to expect gifts, ever.

But setting up a household that is intended to last “until death do you part”; including through multiple Christmas dinners and Thanksgivings, houseguests, children and their growing-up, christenings, birthday parties, graduations, Nobel prizes; does require a certain amount of stuff, some of which you will need to acquire at once and some of which you may need to plan to acquire over the years. In my age and social circle, every household was (is?) expected to be equipped with fine china, silverware, crystal drinkware, and fine household linens (sheets, pillowcases and tablecloths.) Girls were taught the inevitability of needing these things, and thriftily began “collecting” in pre-adolescence. “Household” registries allowed them to receive notice from their department store of sales of “their patterns” and — heaven forbid — of impending pattern cancellations. Great-aunts could inquire at the department store and contribute to the girl’s collection via birthday gifts. Obviously, the traditional norm is to store collected china and other housewares with the parents until the the girl does set up her own household.

Once a young lady did set up her household, traditional registries allowed shame-faced guests to replace broken pieces even after their hostess had assured them that “oh, never mind about that, it happens.” And registries allowed snoopy wedding-guests to spy out the lady’s choices and complete her collection via wedding gifts.

By proper etiquette, gifts ought not to be sent for engagement parties and ought NEVER to be brought to formal parties, but you cannot control what other people do and should not be thinking about preventing them from bringing gifts any more than you are thinking about inducing them to bring gifts.

So if you think of your registry as being about exercising forethought and deliberately designing the type of marital household you wish to have, then you may set up your registry as soon as you find it helpful to do so. Put on it the heirloom-quality goods that you need to plan to acquire over the years, and avoid thinking about what you might score from your dear wedding guests based on what you register. And may you have a long and happy marriage.

coachhw: We didn’t have a long engagement, or engagment parties, but we did set up our registry “soon” after we got engaged (with in 3 months) 90% of that was because my mom was starting her Chirstmas shopping, and it served as my Christmas list.

I think you can start a small registry of things you will use right away, even with moving around. Towles would be my number 1. You can start really small, and then expand when you get closer to your wedding day.